Spain is still recovering after the biggest snowstorm that hit the Mediterranean country in 50 years hit the capital, Madrid, and neighboring regions over the weekend, disrupting traffic and efforts to distribute coronavirus vaccines, and causing at least four deaths.
Most of the snow from Storm Filomena began to fall on Friday night and left 20 inches in the capital and neighboring provinces at the end of Saturday.
Rail service in some areas has been suspended and the New York Times reported that 12,500 miles of roads were closed or interrupted. Firefighters, military personnel and emergency personnel worked to clean tracks and roads from Friday to Saturday, freeing more than 1,500 people trapped in their cars in freezing temperatures.
Although hundreds of roads were cleared on Sunday and outbound flights resumed at Madrid-Barajas airport, the Associated Press reported that roads in parts of the country were still largely blocked and authorities warned that the country had not yet it was clean.
“A week of extreme cold is coming and it will turn all the snow on the ground into ice, thereby multiplying the risk,” Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska told reporters on Sunday. “The storm is bringing with it a cold wave that can push temperatures to record levels,” he added.
At least four people died as a result of the storm. Two homeless people died of exposure – one near Madrid and the other in Calatayud, a city located in the northeast of the country. A woman and a man also drowned after their car was washed away when a river broke out near the southern city of Malaga.
Government officials on Sunday warned people to stay off the road as long as possible, the AP reported, saying that while all the prisoners in their vehicles were rescued, many abandoned vehicles remained on the roads.
Many Spaniards took advantage of the snow for winter fun. On social media, scenes of Spaniards on the streets, happily involved in mass snowball fights, circulated.
Some revelers were even seen skiing through the streets of Madrid.
What’s behind Spain’s historic snow?
Although Spanish reports predicted snow, few expected it to be so intense.
Rubén del Campo, a spokesman for the Spanish government’s meteorological office, Aemet, told reporters that “you would probably have to look back to the 1970s to see if there were blizzards of a similar magnitude in and around the capital.”
It can be incredibly difficult to pinpoint exactly which combination of factors produced this (or any) extreme weather event, but the experts I spoke with said that Filomena’s historic snowfall may have happened because high humidity levels combined with perfect snow temperatures, at just the right time.
In general, the hotter the air, the more moisture it can retain, increasing the potential for precipitation. It is possible that the air before Filomena contained more moisture and then met the “Goldilocks conditions” of about 28 ° F to 32 ° F, which is necessary for snow to settle on the Earth’s surface.
Like Kevin Trenberth of the US National Center for Atmospheric Research he told me: “Maximum snow occurs when the surface temperatures are around 28 degrees Fahrenheit and there is a lot of moisture flowing from the oceans to the storm, where the humidity is abundant, and more abundant than it used to be because of the warming global.”
In the case of Filomena, added Trenberth, “the conditions were perfect”.
This does not necessarily mean that climate change is directly responsible for the snowstorm in Spain.
“You can’t associate this storm with anything directly associated with climate change,” Robut, from Rutgers, told me. “However, having said that, there is nothing in the world of climate these days when climate change has no underlying influence on what happens.”